Of Structural Denial: A Narratological Study of the Structural Disintegration of the Novel Form Hugo Ferraz Maio Gomes

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Of Structural Denial: A Narratological Study of the Structural

Disintegration of the Novel Form

Hugo Ferraz Maio Gomes

Novembro, 2014

Dissertação em Línguas, Literaturas e Culturas

–

Estudos Ingleses e

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Cover your heads, and mocke not fleſh and, blood

With ſolemne Reverence: throw away Reſpect,

Tradition, forme, and Ceremonious duty

William Shakespeare,

The Life and Death of King Richard the Second

I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Mans.

William Blake,

Jerusalem

No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary.

Milorad Pavić,

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I. Lavish Architectures: An Introduction

1. Prolegomena

If an opening to the argument of this dissertation is of imperative necessity, one might tentatively

begin with Herbert Quain, born in Roscommon, Ireland, author of the novels The God of the

Labyrinth (1933) and April March (1936), the short-story collection Statements (1939), and the play

The Secret Mirror (undated). To a certain extent, this idiosyncratic Irish author, who hailed from the

ancient province of Connacht, may be regarded as a forerunner of the type of novels which will be

considered in this dissertation. Quain was, after all, the unconscious creator of one of the first

structurally disintegrated novels in the history of western literature, April March. His first novel, The God

of the Labyrinth, also exhibits elements which are characteristic of structurally disintegrated fiction, for it

provides the reader with two possible solutions to a mysterious crime. As a matter of fact, one

might suggest that Quain’s debut novel offers the reader the possibility to ignore the solution to the crime and carry on living his or her readerly life, turning a blind eye to the novel itself. It may

hence be argued that Quain’s first novel is in fact a compound of three different novels.

It is self-evident that the structure of Quain’s oeuvre is of an experimental nature, combining geometrical precision with authorial innovation, and one finds in it a higher

consideration for formal defiance than for the text itself. In other words, the means of expression

are the concern of the author and not, interestingly, the textual content. April March, for example,

is a novel which regresses back into itself, its first chapter focussing on an evening which is

preceded by three possible evenings which, in turn, are each preceded by three other, dissimilar,

possible evenings. It is a novel of backward-movement, and it is due to this process of branching

regression that April March contains within itself at least nine possible novels. Structure, therefore,

paradoxically controls the text, for it allows the text to expand or contract under its formal

limitations. In other words, the formal aspects of the novel, usually associated with the restrictive

device of a superior design, contribute to a liberation of the novel’s discourse. It is paradoxical only

in the sense that the idea of structure necessarily entails the fixation of a narrative skeleton that

determines how plot and discourse interact, something which Quain flouts for the purposes of

innovation. In this sense, April March’s convoluted structure allows for multiple readings and interpretations of the same text, consciously germinating narratives within itself, producing

different texts from a single, unique source. Thus, text and means of expression are bonded by a

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Quain’s preoccupation with the structural foundation of his novel as opposed to its plot makes manifest Quain’s lack of interest in literary creation, for he is interested not in art itself, so

much as the creation of a new idea of art, which may bestow on him a place in the annals of the

history of literary thought. Indeed, in Quain’s view, innovation precludes improvement. In his

work, the novel form is challenged rather than consolidated. There is no quest for a conceptual

cementation of the form, no pilgrimage for the establishment of a solid definition of ‘the novel’. Instead, there is a continual obsession with formal progression, with excessive experimentation.

The form subsists in the lack of a rooted formality. Like the novel itself, Quain is interested in

literary evolution as opposed to literary consolidation.

These considerations on Herbert Quain would have been of seminal importance to this

dissertation were it not for the fact that Herbert Quain did not write any of these books, nor was

he ever more than a far-winged flight of fancy, conceived by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis

Borges.1_{The nature of this fact, of course, promptly dismisses most of these introductory}

reflections on the imagined works of H. Quain. It does not, however, invalidate the fact that

Quain—or, as it were, Borges—did conceptualize what in this dissertation I define as structural disintegration. Herbert Quain’s nihility should not deter one from considering his significance to the

art of novel writing. There are several lessons to be learned from Quain’s paradoxical inexistent

existence. Firstly, one may concede that Quain’s approach to ‘the novel’ evinces the long-standing allurement of the form and its potentialities. There is a recognition of the novel—that is, of any novel—as something that can be rewritten and redefined. Secondly, if it is true that April March

was never more than an idea in a renowned short-story collection, the same cannot be said of its

concept. Anticipated by Borges, the idea of a ramifying novel was later put into practice by authors

like Italo Calvino—whose If on a winter’s night a traveller will be considered in this dissertation not as a structurally disintegrated novel but as a herald of generative fiction—or Julio Cortázar—whose Hopscotch

will be considered later in this dissertation—which only goes to prove that the idea of a narrative

which is capable of generating other narratives, of treating literature like, as Calvino put it, “a combinatorial game” (Calvino, Uses of Literature 22) has been one of the defining elements in the construction of the novel form. Novels are based on other novels, standing on the shoulders of

giants who, in turn, once stood on the shoulders of other giants, and so forth. The most significant

lesson one might learn from Quain’s nonexistence is that fiction has the power to generate itself,

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and that from one single, isolated narrative thousands of possible fictions may be deduced or

imagined.2

2. The Burden of the Dissertation

Now that the idea of this dissertation has been introduced, it is time to make the acquaintance of

its burden. “Of Structural Denial: A narratological study of the structural disintegration of the novel form”is an exploration of novels which, like Quain’s, have disregarded fixed formal elements in exchange for an arbitrary disposition of structural design. In other words, the type of novels which

I will peruse distinguishes itself by flouting conventional structural patterns, proffering the reader

the capability to be the structural erector of the text. The process through which these novels

accomplish this I shall call structural disintegration. The burden of this critical endeavour will be the

assessment of these novels and the heterogeneous methods each uses to achieve this subversive

effect: novels like Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1 (1962), for example, lack an inherent, even physical, structure, with unbound pages arbitrarily placed on top of each other inside of a box,

whilst novels such as Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! (2012) give the illusion of a formal design but turn

the reader’s understanding of the form on its head by employing labyrinthine explorations of

textual possibilities. Alongside this study of the formal aspects of this type of novels, I will also

consider its significance, relevance, and consequential impact on the much-debated concept of ‘the

novel’. I will take into account whether this selective type of novels challenges the idea of the novel or whether it distinguishes itself by rejecting any conceptual association with the form. In other

words, are these novels breaking the boundaries of the novel form or are they trying to distance

themselves from it? One thing that should be acknowledged, when considering texts such as these,

is that any novel which is structurally disintegrated can be read in multiple different ways. The

consequences of these multiple readings will be assayed in the second chapter of this dissertation,

which concerns itself solely with the structural disintegration phenomenon.

My methodological approach lies on a principle of deduction, since an exhaustive

enumeration and analysis of structurally disintegrated texts would at once be utopian and, to be sure,

redundant. What I present in this dissertation is a hypothesis of a poetics of structural disintegration,

which introduces both a fictional plane capable of multiplying itself to a potential infinity and an

2_{It is this self-sufficient characteristic of fiction, which is obviously not exclusive to novel writing, that I will later}

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alternative to the limitations of the novelistic conventional form (in particular to the realist genre,

as we will later see). It is my wish in this study to neither be dogmatic or unscientific, for which

reason this dissertation will conclude on a note that neither validates nor invalidates the theory it

presents. It shall rather propose the consolidation and dissolution of itself. Theory, after all, is the

logical structure of a possible design.

In the first chapter, which I have titled “On Structure”, I will begin by assessing the concept

of structure in novel writing, that is, how structural design serves an authorial purpose in the novel

form. I will exercise a metaphor of the novel as a building. If the novel is a building, it follows that

the novel’s author is both its architect and erector. The structure, therefore, and consequently the

author’s ‘structural purpose’, is entirely dependent on the original author of the text. As we will verify in later chapters, that is not quite the case with generative fiction, a type of structurally disintegrated novels.

Following these initial considerations, a definition of the concept structural fixation will be

established, and we will see what principles this concept entails. I will define what is understood in

this dissertation as conventional novel and defiant conventional novel, to better evince the differences

between structural fixation and structural disintegration. Regarding what is defined as conventional novel, I

will elaborate a list of criteria and examples that delineate the conventionality which is argued in

the dissertation. In other words, I will identify what is conventional about the conventional novel.

After this definition, I will explore the bond shared between form and content in conventional novels.

That is to say, how does a fixed structure affect the novel form? Is ‘structural purpose’ a defining

aspect of the novel?

Following this analysis of the conventional novel, I will consider novels which defy this

conventionality but remain fixated to an authorial structural design. These novels I call defiant

conventional novels. Regarding the defiant conventional novel, there are several novels which I will examine,

though only summarily. A few of these novels are James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), Laurence

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67), and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Parts (1981). These examples, albeit relevant to the present discussion, were chosen for the value of their literary effect

rather than for their impact in the literary tradition, as the objective of this dissertation is not to

review the (canonical) evolution of the defiant conventional novel but rather to describe how its defiance

of the conventional novel, when juxtaposed with structural disintegration, is in fact closer to convention

and tradition than to the more acute defiance of structural order employed in structurally disintegrated

fiction. That is to say, since the author of a defiant conventional novel does not move away from the

structural fixation of the narrative, it is rather hard for the defiant conventional novel to wholly flout said

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employed by several authors of defiant conventional novels to verify how their attempt to ‘defixate’ the structural design of the text is a failed one, within the broader structural fixation of the text. I will

demonstrate how, despite subverting authorial devices to manifest their confrontation of the

modality of the conventional novel, these novels remain unwaveringly fixated within a structural

design, generating a formal and textual tension that is made manifest by the apparent difficulty of

some of the texts in question.

In the second chapter of the dissertation, titled “Against Structure”, which, owing to the

nature of this dissertation, will be far more extensive and thorough in its analysis, I will briefly

review the concept of structural fixation, so as to compare it to its antithetical concept, structural

disintegration. A definition of the latter term will follow this brief review. I shall then introduce the

concept generative fiction, establishing its principles and defining its purpose. Two key concepts for

the understanding of generative fiction will be further presented: the concepts of original author and of

other author, which characterize the dialectic author/reader in this type of structurally disintegrated fiction.

This will be followed by a consideration of four novels which act as forerunners of structural

disintegration, bearing in mind the fact that some of them, such as Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a

traveller (1979), were published after key structurally disintegrated texts had already been published, such

as Saporta’s Composition No.1 or B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969). These four novels are

Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style(1949), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire(1962), Georges Perec’s

Life A User’s Manual(1978), and the aforementioned Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. They will be regarded as precursors of generative fiction, ergo pre-generative, that is, texts which precede,

or that blazon but do not perform, the structurally disintegrated state exhibited by generative fiction. 3

Following this discussion of pre-generative fiction, I will proceed to explore the first type of

structurally disintegrated novels, which I have named generative fiction. I will consider several novels which,

linked to the idea of a fiction which generates other fictions, make use of the subversive form of

structural disintegration to explore, or break, the boundaries of the novel form, storytelling, and the

text itself. The novels which will be taken into account are Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1 (1962), Edouard Levé’s Works (2002), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes

(2010), Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Landscape Painted with Tea (1988), and Last Love in Constantinople(1994), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves(2000), Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow!

3 For an explanation of this peculiar terminology, see the subsection “An Overview of _{Pre-Generative fiction}” in the

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(2012), and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), novels here presented according to the structure of the dissertation, as opposed to a chronological logic.

The following step in this journey through structural disintegration is the introduction and

interpretation of the other type of structurally disintegrated novel, the idiorealistnovel. In this subsection

of the dissertation, I shall elaborate a definition of idiorealist fiction and establish its relationship to

its parent term, realism. I will examine also the idea of mimesis, which is inherently attached to the

idea of idiorealism. The concept will be analysed in the light of a tradition of novelistic

experimentation that ventures to mimetically represent reality in the novel form. It will be

ascertained that idiorealist fiction makes use of the disintegrated nature of structural disintegration to

propose an idea of reality as arbitrary and lacking a structural design. Two novels will be considered

for this effect: B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates(1969) and Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012).

The conclusion to this dissertation, which I have titled “Becoming Irrelevant”, initiates with

an expatiation on what may be termed the dance of literary entropy. Since it is this author’s wish

not to extend this dissertation beyond the acceptable limits of textual and dissertational extension,

this opening section of the conclusion will merely introduce, rather than copiously expound, the

idea of a resilient novel form.4_{I shall consider the postmodern move from}_{structural fixation}_to

structural disintegration, observing how the shift of power from author to reader and the dismissal of

‘structural purpose’ contribute toward a discernible understanding of the significance of structural disintegration to the novel form. I will posit a hypothesis, regarding the fate of the novel, based on

an empirical comprehension of the history of the genre—influenced, in particular, by the theory of the novel developed by scholars such as Steven Moore and Mikhail Bakhtin. The general

principle of this theory is the following: the novel, which was fuelled from its conception by a

liberating approach to textual narrative, was from the eighteenth-century fixated to a set of rules

and principles, that were then stripped and removed by constant formal and diegetic

experimentation, until its structural design was, at last, in the postmodern era, disintegrated. From

the structural order of its incipience, the novel progressively gave rise to an entropic textual and

formal condition that simultaneously hampers any possibility of the novel form either dying out or

stalling within a labyrinth of repetitive formal construction. In other words, I will assess how the

novel is a literary form that demands liberation and that depends on continuous metamorphosis,

be it of form or content, to resist and not perish.

4_{For the same reason, albeit applied in this case to the present introduction, a full disclosure of the contents of this}

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3. A Refutation of Ergodic Literature

In a book published in 1995, titled Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, the Norwegian scholar

Espen J. Aarseth developed a theory of the cybertext which defined some of the novels I discuss

in this dissertation as ‘ergodic’. Aarseth’s purpose was to produce a unified theory of cybertext that would conglomerate physical and electronic texts. It would thus silence the academic voices that

separated both on, according to Aarseth, purely material or historical levels (Aarseth 17-18).

In this dissertation, I purposely chose to, as it were, turn a blind eye to Aarseth’s theory, not out of disrespect for an obviously well-researched and learned study of cybertextual narratives,

but because the ‘ergodic’ nature he describes as related to novels like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is

better suited for a narrative that is not linked to what one might call a ‘traditional physicality’. Novels like Cortázar’s depend on an awareness of the traditional principles of the novel form

(which we will consider in the first chapter of this dissertation), not to speak of the conception of

the physical text as something which can be moulded and adapted by the reader. Indeed, just as

the concept ‘ergodic’ characterizes the process of reading as a labyrinthine and open-ended immersion in the text, giving the reader an interventional role in the creation of the work, so does

it fail to acknowledge the significance of the ‘traditional physicality’ on some of the texts he defines as ‘ergodic’—either to the form of the novel or to the broader world of literature. In other words, to merely describe, for example, the reading of Milorad Pavić’s Landscape Painted with Tea as labyrinthine and the reader as a path-making intervener, is erroneous at best. The reader does not

enter a labyrinth as much as s/he builds one with the materials provided by the author: in Pavić’s case, this helps preserve the novelty of the work, for multiple labyrinths may spring from a single

source. And while ‘ergodic’ is defined as involving “nontrivial effort” (Aarseth 1), and while

Aarseth recognizes that multiple texts and readings are created by literature which indulges in this

form, it does not provide a satisfactory explanation as to what these novels actually accomplish on

their own. In sum, ‘ergodic’ is limited to the produced effect of the cybertext, and dismisses the

implications which are inherently attached to it. Further, Aarseth ignores that the “functional

differences” (15) between physical and electronic texts are, in fact, the elements which bestow on

these texts their fundamental nature. In other words, the physical text depends on its physicality to

challenge the reader’s idea of the novel form. The electronic text, on the other hand, depends on its incorporeal existence to initiate a new process of reading: that is to say, it demands new

vocabulary to interpret its functionality. It is to these texts only—and not to physical texts—that

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To render the difference between my own work and Aarseth’s on a metaphorical level,

Aarseth deals with shapes, whilst my work is preoccupied with forms, planes, and the things in

between. Admittedly, the reader as creator of fiction, who dares to go beyond the text, whose image

of the literary and the process of literary creation is subverted, is something that is touched upon

by Aarseth. Yet, it remains, for the most of it, unexplored. This particular fact is not to be mistaken

for a flaw in Aarseth’s theory, since it has more to do with his desire to converge two distinct forms

of textual narrative—which, in my opinion, are attached to two different systems of narratological creation/reception—into a unified theory. Even considering Aarseth’s reviewal of what is a

physical text and an electronic text, the theory still fails to recognize, for example, Johnson’s

Unfortunates as a text that, rather than being ‘ergodic’, wants to be uncompromisingly realist.

Furthermore, Aarseth’s unified theory is unassumingly superficial when applied to physical texts

such as Johnson’s: it relies only on the fact that the reader intervenes in the construction of the

text. It describes process but not purpose or effect.

The latent function of structurally disintegrated texts is to destabilize the reading of

conventional texts: there is a quest for ‘defixation’ of structural patterns. Therein lies the strongest critique I have to make of Aarseth’s ergodic theory: the difference between physical and electronic

texts lies precisely on their functionality. Even if on a theoretical level there is a shared “principle of calculated production” (Aarseth 5), this principle does not account for the conscious effect of

structurally disintegratednovels on conventional fiction, and their sense of a novelistic tradition. While

texts like Saporta’s Composition No.1 try to reinvigorate, challenge, reconstruct the novel form, electronic texts are, of necessity, inaugurating different textualities, even if based on, to be sure,

traditional ones. The two may intersect, of course, but to mistake one for the other would be a

theoretical mistake. After all, if one seeks to destabilize convention, the other seeks to create said

convention. They are, in this sense, antithetical.

I must assume that there is a certain theoretical gamble in negotiating Aarseth’s terms in

such a lukewarm manner, together with the fact that my own theories of the novels he names

‘ergodic’ present a challenging viewpoint which is more adequately inscribed in the tradition of the novel form than in the electronic realm. Yet, it is my foremost intention to apply traditional literary

conventions and methods of analysis to structural disintegration, which is unconventional only in

relation to the overall conventionality of the form. In this way, I hope to prove how structurally

disintegrated novels depend on structurally fixated novels not only to manifest their divergent

interpretation of the novel but also to subvert the fixation of fiction into predetermined patterns,

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I to submit to Aarseth’s theory, who sees these texts more as prototypical and symptomatic, than

as part of a novelistic tradition that is still to fade into inexistence.

Fortunately, theories of structure and form, while not interdependent or intersectional, can

coexist in dissonance, not necessarily denying or confirming each other’s propositions. As Aarseth

himself acknowledges in the conclusion to his book, one may choose to “ignore” (Aarseth 183) his neologistic terms and choose a different path of interpretation of this type of novels. An attitude

which, ironically, evinces an ergodic tint.

4. On Hypertext Fiction

I chose to exclude hypertext fiction from this discussion of structural fixation and structural

disintegration, for these electronic texts, albeit of necessity considered ‘novels’, are already beyond

what one may consider tangibility. Their form is, even if only in nature, dependent on the reader’s active construction. That is, there are no bound pages, no physical limitations. It is a theoretical

infinity. That is not to say, however, that hypertext fiction cannot be considered structurally

disintegrated fiction, but one should take into account the fact that the presentation of these texts

already evinces a structural disintegration that is unquestionably impossible to fixate, unless it regresses

to a physical, as opposed to digital, condition. A different typology could, theoretically, be

elaborated for hypertext fiction, yet, for reasons of brevity, I will limit my study to those works

that have been published in physical format and that are dependent on the reader’s conception of

the novel as a purely physical text. This does not preclude the existence, in some of these texts, of

an attraction to hypertextual reality. The London-based publisher Visual Editions’ modern edition

of Saporta’s Composition No.1, for example, published the novel in both physical and e-book format, further challenging any preconceptions that the reader might transport to the reading of the novel.5

5 Curiously, this edition of Saporta’s _{Composition No.1} includes an “Anatomy of Your Favourite Novel” conceived by

Salvador Plascencia, who also designed the diagrams which adorn the back side of the novel’s loose sheets and the box in which these are included. In this “Anatomy”, which has a dirge-like quality to it, with its thorough explanation and schematization of a familiar object, Plascencia presents the reader with sketches of four prototypical novels, one showing a book’s cover, the other showing its back, another with an open book and, finally, one showing a book which possesses a right-to-left orientation (Saporta n. p.). Plascencia’s text, however, serving as it does as an introduction to

Composition No.1, presents a version of the novel which is not compatible with Saporta’s text. It suggests, instead, the

faint outline of an idea of the novel which, after Saporta’s text, and I daresay after the advent of structural disintegration,

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5. A Note on Texts in Translation

I have chosen to rely on French, Italian, Spanish, and Serbian texts in English translation for the

purposes of coherence and unity. It was my foremost preoccupation that the text should not read

like a babelish congregation of languages and that the wide variety of literatures gathered here

should not affect the intelligibility of the argument being proposed. Further, since the purpose of

this dissertation is to analyse the formal elements of the novel form, there is no substantial need

for some of the texts used to be in the original, rather than in translation. Even so, I have made an

effort to select, where possible, the best translations in the English language, and it is my hope that

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II. On Structure

1. The Novel and The Building

Perhaps one ought to begin with an anacrustic simile: a novel is a mausoleum. Once inside this silent

tomb, a dauntless reader may only guess at the nature of the body that lies within its cavernous

depths, fumbling through torchless, labyrinthian corridors that bend and fold into endless recesses,

left without hope of ever uncovering the vast extent of its secrets. Despite the word’s etymological root (it derives from the Latin novella, or ‘new thing’), the novel is often regarded as an immutable

literary form.6_{Even if one concedes that some novels}—_{generally seen as exceptions to the rule}—

indulge in nonlinearity and unconventionality in their formal construction, structure itself is

nonetheless fixed to a particular number of formal assumptions and principles that formulate that

which we commonly understand as ‘conventionality’. Indeed, as the texts examined in this dissertation prove, most novels are subjected to a fixed structure, being conceived by an author

and presented to a reader. Considering that the analysis of the novel form in this dissertation will

be circumscribed to the appearance, structure, and form of the novel, it is not out of place to

suggest a metaphor that may adequately produce an overview of the topics examined in our

discussion.

A novel is a methodic construction, whose foundations are carefully laid by its creator— the author—and whose form and content are interpreted by those who peruse it—the readers. It is certainly not unfathomable, then, to regard the novel as one regards a building. Let us consider,

for a brief paragraph, a hypothetical building’s form and structure, its shape and presentation. The

building’s physical appearance, if barren and small, may not disclose to the inquisitive passer-by

6It is important to note here the literary ‘rift’ argued by the renowned French literary critic, Roland Barthes, in

S/Z

(1970), an extensive analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s short-story “Sarrasine”. In his book, Barthes proposes a categorial distinction between what he terms ‘readerly‘ and ‘writerly‘ texts. The former category nears the idea of ‘immutable

form’ that I allude to in this passage, referring to texts which are “tonal text[s]” (Barthes, S/Z 30) and that “make up

the enormous mass of our literature” (5), while the latter category encompasses the vast majority of novels discussed in this dissertation, that is, texts which demand the reader’s engagement—to wit, “the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem, the essay without the dissertation, writing without style, production without product, structuration without structure” (5). As mentioned, it is Barthes’s idea of a ‘readerly’ text, of a novel which demands no effort from the reader—who is limited to a basic perusal of the text—that I refer to as conventional, the linear, derivative text. ‘Writerly’ texts, on the other hand, are often seen as variations or singular experiments. The Barthesian concept is debatable, of course, seeing that it is often dependent on the interpretation, and not execution, of the text: a text might be simultaneously readerly or writerly, or concomitantly both, as Richard Howard suggests (Howard ix; see also Moore, 20 for further comments on the writerly/readerly question). Further in this chapter, to unearth this

invisible thread that binds the ‘writerly’ and the ‘readerly’, I will deconstruct the idea of conventional novel and argue for

a metamorphic nature of what is understood as ‘convention’ and ‘tradition’, using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as an

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the potential comfort of the quarters established beneath its ill-thatched roof. An exuberant,

grandiose aesthetic, on the other hand, might conceal the emptiness of that which lies in between

its walls, easily unmasked were this inquisitive passer-by to cross its auriferous threshold. Its form,

therefore, is not diametrically related to its content. If we venture further into this metaphorical

exercise, we may suppose the building to be richly endowed with skilful ornaments, bearing classical

embellishments as evocative as a dozen lateral-sited towering Tuscan pilasters making way for a

frontispiece which is shadowed by a decastyle portico girdled with a faint odour of gold, in turn

shaded by a facade layered with cornucopian stained glass glossed with a variety of colours. Its

entrails, however, might only bear the bare qualities that allow for the definition of a building,

bordering an empty space devoid of meaning. It may also fall short of the inherent beauty one

usually associates with the familiar solace of one’s own home. It might, albeit only occasionally,

appear in a most heterodox fashion: lozenge-shaped, windowless, doorless, colourless, perhaps

even roofless, subscribed to a systematic deconstruction of its parts induced by a rebellion against

established concepts. It might present a conscious denial of the common understanding of the

concept of ‘building’. Notwithstanding, a building remains a building, even if a poorly cemented,

aesthetically oblivious, structurally unpleasant one. It may founder under its own weight or crumble

under its pretentious claims to originality, but the fact remains that the idea of ‘it’ as a building is unencumbered by these practicalities.

The metaphor of the novel as ‘building’ is not therefore entirely without reason. The novel

as structure may better elucidate the analogy. The etymological origin of the word structure is found

in the Latin word structura, which finds its English equivalent in the words building or edifice. Structura

itself derives from the past participle of the verb struere (structus), to which the English equivalent

would be to assemble, to join together (OED, “structure, n.”). Throughout the history of the novel,

literary structure has been, to some extent, a fixed contrivance, an established framework carefully

put together by the novel’s author. The Anglo-American New Critics, for example, assumed this

conception of the literary work: according to the theoretical school’s tenets, the symbols,

metaphors, and tropes of a text are all interrelated, forming a web of signifiers which is

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and brick-maker that devises and erects these webs of signifiers, which, even if arbitrary and

incongruous, are the ‘composites’7_{of a structure. This idea of the novel I shall call}_{structural fixation}_.

The concept of structural fixation implies a novelistic structure that is restricted by authorial

control, that is, a structure that is planned and architected by the novel’s author and to which the reader is inherently subjugated. In other words, if the novel has a fixed structure, being dependent

on structural fixation, then, to use our early metaphor, this kind of novel is a building in whose

construction the reader does not participate. The consequences of this structural fixation to literary

theory are openly exposed by the importance which is attributed by the author to the structural

design of the novel. That is to say, if a novel possesses a carefully designed structure and

well-defined formal aspects, and if these are found to be the foundation of the text’s meaning, then any

hermeneutic exercise, indeed any theoretical expedition which seeks to interpret the text, inflected

upon the novel should, in theory, take into account the author’s ‘structural purpose’. This ‘structural purpose’ bears certain implications in the reading and interpretation of a text. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), an example of a novel which begins, to use Horatio’s term, ab ovo, is indissociable from the tradition of Bildungsroman, a tradition that is arguably associated with

intellectual growth, with maturity, and, therefore, with a beginning that impetuously moves towards

an ending.8_{In this system of}_{structural fixation}_{, the reader acts only as the receiver and interpreter of} the novel: the structure is part of the author’s planning and is, therefore, the representation of a

meaning.

The novel is hence verbal and textual architecture. It is a literary form that conglomerates

the vitality of the artistic spirit and the rational vivisection of the scientific realm, combining the

mathematical scrupulousness of the design of its parts with the spontaneous fluidity of the objects

of its nature. Theory has not dismissed this characteristic of the form. Referring to the novel’s

capacity to conglomerate into a whole a sum of the most variegated parts, the Marxist critic Terry

Eagleton writes, “[the novel] is the most hybrid of literary forms, a space in which different voices, idioms, and belief-systems continuously collide” (Eagleton, English Novel 5-6), a view similar to

Bakhtin’s, whom he goes on to mention in a later paragraph: “Bakhtin is surely right to see the

novel as emerging from the stream of culture dripping with the shards and fragments of other

7 The meaning of the term ‘composite’ used in this passage refers to an old, now obsolete acceptation, whose modern

equivalent would be ‘component’. The latter term was precluded by the former, however, in keeping with the style of the author.

8_{In his book on the}_{Bildungsroman}_genre,_{The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture}_{, Franco Moretti}

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forms” (6). For Eagleton, the apex of the novel form has already been left behind, having taken

place in the first half of the twentieth century, and stands now as a figurative beacon, enlightening

the path of the many offspring it produced. Thus, he declares, in a sombre, dirgeful tone, “The great European novel of the early twentieth century - Proust, Mann, Musil - was able to weave

together myth and history, psychological insight and social commentary, ethics and politics, satire

and spirituality, comedy and tragedy, realist narrative and a fantasia of the unconscious” (336). Yet the pervading sentiment in Eagleton’s theoretical thought is that of a novel which in its mutable garment, is forever changing faces and altering its literary countenance.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Steven Moore, one of the leading authorities on William

Gaddis, comments on the novel’s affiliation with innovation, difficulty, and erudite vigour, calling

it “a delivery system for aesthetic bliss” (Moore, Beginnings 15). Moore further notes that novels which do battle with tradition are responsible for the sustenance of the form, and in an exhortation

executed in the exordium of his voluminous study of the novel, he writes:

Give me fat novels stuffed with learning and rare words, lashed with

purple prose and black humor; novels patterned after myths, the Tarot,

the Stations of the Cross, a chessboard, a dictionary, an almanac, the

genetic code, a game of golf, a night at the movies; novels with unusual

layouts, paginated backward, or with sentences running off the edges, or

printed in different colors, a novel on yellow paper, a wordless novel in

woodcuts, a novel in first chapters, a novel in the form of an anthology,

Internet postings, or an auction catalog; huge novels that occupy a single

day, slim novels that cover a lifetime; novels with footnotes, appendices,

bibliographies, star charts, fold-out maps, or with a reading

comprehension test or Q&A supplement at the end; novels peppered with

songs, poems, lists, excommunications; novels whose chapters can be read

in different sequences, or that have 150 possible endings; novels that are

all dialogue, all footnotes, all contributors’ notes, or one long paragraph; novels that begin and end midsentence, novels in fragments, novels with

stories within stories; towers of babble, slang, shoptalk, technical terms,

sweet nothings; give me many-layered novels that erect a great wall of

words for protection against the demons of delusion and irrationality at

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The astute reader will find that many of the novels hinted at in this inspired invocation are to be

found enclosed, if not in the entirety of its parts, at least in partiality and in subtle reference, within

the walls of this dissertation.

Yet, to move on from extraneous theoretical perspectives, let us trace our steps back to the

footpath of structural analogy. In the light of the aforementioned revelatory architectural metaphor,

a question may now arise from the vaults of conceptual definition: what is structure? To put it in

simple terms, structure is the anatomy of text. As the bedrock of a novel, the idea of structure

implies adherence to a set number of principles which guide the novel’s discourse from the author

to the reader. Structural design follows the pattern of the novel’s ideology, that is to say, it is the performance of the discourse and an exhibition of the text’s ‘purpose’ and ‘theme’. Structure,

therefore, is the arrangement and configuration of a novel’s elements that conveys the novel’s meaning on an ‘anatomical’ textual sense. The absence of structure and, in turn, of a structural

design (apart from a superficial and obvious allusion to disorder and chaos) renders the work of

art—the novel—plastic in its meaning and, furthermore, erases the limitative barriers which are

imposed by the author when the work is bound to a ‘structural purpose’. It is the denial of authority

and, concomitantly, the affirmation of the reader’s puissance. It cannot, however, perform this action without a tradition of structural enforcement, so it is dependent, in this sense, on the

validation of structure to execute its structural renunciation.

The subject of this chapter, as indicated by its title and the preceding remarks, is structure

and the conventional structural presentation of the novel form. I will propose that structural fixation

is characteristic of conventional novels and defiant conventional novels. Later in the chapter, I shall review

the principles and implications of each of these structural concepts—counterposed by structural disintegration, which subverts the principles of structural design and structural purpose. For purposes

of clarity, at this introductory point in the chapter, it is better to provide an example of what is

meant by structurally fixated fiction, in particular of a conventional novel. If a hypothetical novel, written

by a hypothetical author, were to open with Chapter A, and were this Chapter A to be followed by

Chapters B, C, and D, and were this novel to conclude with Chapter Z, acting in accordance to an

internal chronology, then this novel, regardless of its (low-keyed) diegetic or linguistic

experimentation, would be interpreted in this dissertation as a conventional, structurally fixated novel.

This fact would be attributable to the reader’s perception of the literary work as ‘fixated’ to a

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has a clear structural design and which generally exercises chronological diligence, can theoretically

unearth, with precision, a structural skeleton, from its head to its tail.

2. The Conventional Novel

Conventionality is a substantious word. Of the whole and varied extent of the English lexicon, it

is arguably a word which, if particularly applied to the novel form, conceals a strong conflict of

opposition beneath the innocent cloth of its syllabic agglomeration. It bears certain implications

that lead into complex and theoretical mazes from which one may never find the way out. Firstly,

what is a conventional novel? It is implied in the word ‘conventional’ (in the context presently being

discussed) that there are elements shared between novels which allow the novel form to be formally

acknowledged, hence following a determinate number of common principles. Dramatic and poetic

texts, for example, as has been noted, can be easily recognized by their formal presentation. In

theory, then, the novel form can be just as patently identified.

The Oxford English Dictionaryreveals to the curious inquirer that the word ‘conventional’,

applied to art in general, means the following: “Art. Consisting in, or resulting from, an artificial treatment of natural objects; following accepted models or traditions instead of directly imitating

nature or working out original ideas” (OED, “conventional, adj. and n.”). In this sense, the novel

form, if displaying ‘conventionality’, follows a tradition of form and structure, abiding by rules that make possible the identification of the novel as distinct from the poem, the treatise, or the dramatic

piece. And yet, if there is such a concept as that of a ‘conventional’ novel, then its conceptual opposition has, of necessity, to be implicitly present in the term itself. That is to say, if there are

conventional novels, if the novel form complies with a structural design that makes possible a

systematic, conceptual definition of its parts, then a counterposing ‘unconventionality’ ought to be also in existence. To name a category is to define already its conceptual opposition, since the

existence of concept A implies concept B. A deviation from the established form of the novel,

therefore, is already implicit in the nature of the form itself. It follows that what is bound into a

fixed category may soon spawn shapes which reject previously established definitions. Such

behaviour allows for a continuous revision of both the concept of novel or of any assumptions of

literary genre.9_Hence,_{conventional novels}_{, prescribed to the shrine of tradition, inadvertently give rise}

9 It is worth to mention here, as an example, the metamorphic nature of literary genres (see Jacques Derrida’s “The

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to unconventional novels, which make use of said tradition to subvert it and to suggest its

capitulation. In this dissertation, however, novels which would elsewhere be regarded as

unconventional—viz. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wakeor Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books, to name a few— in the light of structural disintegration, are considered defiant conventional novels. To put

it another way, their ‘unconventionality’ is counteracted, on a structural level, by the

unconventional formal nature of structurally disintegrated fiction. We shall explore this in depth in the

next subchapter.

As evinced by the former statements, the concept of ‘conventionality’ in this dissertation will be considered solely on structural terms, even if, admittedly, it is necessary to take into

consideration the unfeasible task of severing the bond between form and content. Consequently,

I will limit myself to a punctilious delineation of the main principles of each concept, and to an

exemplification of what is meant by each of the defined terms, without necessarily disregarding any

possible ‘structural purpose’ conceived by an author. One need only peer at the debate surrounding

the concept of ‘novel’, to ascertain that the game of definitions is a dangerous game to play. For this reason, the considerations I have drawn regarding ‘conventionality’ and the novel form are

meant to be applicable chiefly within the context of this dissertation. They are intended to be

neither authoritative nor dogmatic, and are instead hypotheses that help trace the phenomenon of

structural disintegration and its effects with more precision. Without doubt, questions will immediately

arise after browsing through the history of the novel while bearing these concepts in mind. Where

would one include the novels of Henry James, for example? Or, for that matter, Virginia Woolf?

Do these authors follow tradition or do they sever their ties with it? Do their novels narrate a single

story or, instead, one story out of many possible stories? Would they be regarded as a hybrid species

of a doubled genus, concomitantly conventional and defiant conventional novels? Mark, for instance, Alain

Robbe-Grillet’s thoughts on the initial fate of embryonic forms of any artistic medium. He notes,

“A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms” (Robbe-Grillet 468). For that reason, the concept of conventional, detached from any specific frame of reference (as in the case of this dissertation),

soon evinces its mutable conceptual contours, for to crystalize a concept that is unchangeable is to

fasten and secure its obsolescence.

There are three ruling principles in a conventional novel, as defined in the context of this

dissertation, which shall be enumerated at once. First and foremost, as we have already seen, the

conventional novel is dedicated to tradition. It exhibits a preoccupation with traditional novel writing,

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planning. In doing so, the conventional novel promotes the unity and continuity of the form. Its sense

of progress implies respect for custom and convention and, on a structural level, affinity with

established forms. The conventional novelunderstands the sense of the novel’s history.

Secondly, a conventional novel eschews the use of formal experimentalism. Its chief objective

is to subscribe to an orthodox novelistic structural design. That being so, the author’s ‘structural purpose’ is hence inherently related to a past tradition. The author manipulates the novel’s

structural design to serve a specific purpose. In the case of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as previously mentioned, the ab ovo structure of the novel is mirrored by its subscription to the Bildungsroman

genre. As such, contrary to defiant conventional novels, the conventional novel does not make use of an

experimental structural design, for to do so would be to negate its association to tradition and

history. It would pose an impediment to the historical continuity of the form.

Lastly, the third principle of a conventional novel is the principle of storytelling. In other words,

a conventional novel is a novel which has a defined plot, a determinate number of characters that

interact with each other, and events which are narrated either by a first or third-person narrator,

customarily in chronological order. These three principles—bond with tradition; rejection of experimental techniques; well-defined storytelling—are the characteristics of the conventional novel

that set it apart from the defiant conventional novel. As we will see, the latter impetuously counteracts

and flouts these three principles.

An example of a conventional novel is now in order, so as to make explicit what is meant by

its proposed definition. Regard The Baron in the Trees (1957), a novel written by the Italian author

Italo Calvino, who, incidentally, also wrote one of the four novels considered in this dissertation

as pre-generative. The novel narrates, in the course of its 30 chapters, the story of Cosimo Piovasco

di Rondò, as told by his brother, Biagio Piovasco di Rondò, beginning with his negation of life

among civilization and Man, and subsequent decision to live the remaining years of his life on trees,

and concluding with his ascension, on an air balloon, to the cosmic mouth of the Ombrosian sky.

The novel complies with the criteria of a conventional novel as defined in the context of this

dissertation, for it possesses a traditional linear design, which discloses a story, and it avails itself

of little experimentalism. On a structural plane, it is evidently conventional.

Howbeit, perspectives on form are forever shifting shape. Thus, certain novels, which at

the time of their publication were considered unconventional, gradually came to be regarded as

conventional. Their once abnormal configuration lost its innovative power, in consequence of the

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widely regarded as one of Dickens’s greatest achievements, may clarify any residual doubts as to what is meant in this dissertation by the term conventional novel. On the structural dimension of the

novel, the critic Stephen Gill wrote, “[Bleak House’s] highly unusual narrative structure in itself

constantly and insistently foregrounds interpretative activity” (Gill xvi). Still, despite the novel’s

apparently uncommon structural complexity, the three principles identified in the previous

paragraphs are manifested here. While once the novel’s structure might have been thought of as

atypical, in this dissertation it is identified as conventional. The principle of structural tradition is the

most glaringly present one. The novel is, first of all, divided into numbered and named chapters,

owing to its publication in monthly instalments. It is structured with a straightforward, linear

‘beginning-middle-and-end’ configuration, where a story is told, narrated both by the novel’s

‘heroine’, Esther Summerson, in the first person, and by a third-person omniscient narrator, who narrates the story in the present tense. What little experimentalism there may be, it does not affect

the novel form in a way that defies conventionality as it is understood in this dissertation. Its

experimental qualities lie timidly elsewhere, in diegetic and linguistic strata. If compared with James

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), to which we shall return after a brief paragraphical interjection, Bleak House’s

structure is both modest and reserved, even if one accounts for the two narrative voices inlaid

within it. One recalls the above-quoted words of Robbe-Grillet.

We arrive here at a crucial crossroads in this journey through structural fixation, at a point

which might help one to differentiate the conventional novel from the defiant conventional novel. The heart

of the matter presently at hand is the marriage of form and content in the novel. Given the fact

that form is the foundation of the building, carrying on its shoulders the infrastructure of the

project, and that other elements which are allocated and attributed to it are elements which give

the building its individuality and its ‘sense-of-being’, it follows that there exists a mutual correspondence between the former and the latter. That is, that in the novel form, form and

content depend on each other’s consonance to produce a coherent internal logic. One may

interpret it in the following manner: if the content of a novel could not exist outside of the form

within which it is exercised without loss of meaning, so would the form of the novel be a vapid,

lifeless ruin without the elements which bestow on it its individual nature. Thus, form and content

cannot but overlap and intersect each other’s paths. Structural design is an integral part of the diegesis of a novel, being the foundation on which the content of the novel is settled. Hence, the

conventional novel often (although not always) conforms to a conventional, linear discourse, and the

defiant conventional novel hews to less traditional, more transgressive discourses, designed to emulate

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Now let the reader consider a novel which stands in between the margins of an imagined

border. In the conceptual context we are presently discussing, and taking into account the

conclusions we have drawn so far, James Joyce’s second novel, Ulysses, should theoretically suggest a conventional form seeing that, on the level of content, the novel adheres to an apparently traditional

skeleton, telling the (fallaciously) linear story of a day in the life of ordinary Leopold Bloom and

despondent Stephen Daedalus. If one were to consider, in fact, the novel’s open alliance with the

Homeric poem to which it pays homage, then the principle of tradition and the principle of

storytelling would be more than confirmed. Yet, one should not ignore the fact that Ulysses’

linguistic and diegetic experimentalism directly influence the novel’s structural design. Ulysses

suingly stands in between two worlds, the classical age and the modern age of incalculable

possibility. Just as antiquity merges with modernity, so too is the conventional faced with the defiant

in the lines of Joyce’s magnum opus. Ulysses conglomerates the fervour of spontaneity and verbal radicalism with the restrictive, yet confirming, lushness of the forms of the past, indicating, not

only on a structural level, how an author is concomitantly indebted to his or her innovative spirit

as to the authoritative voices of those others who came before. As Robbe-Grillet suggests, “The writer himself, despite his desire for independence, is situated within an intellectual culture and a

literature which can only be those of the past. It is impossible for him to escape altogether from

this tradition of which he is the product” (Robbe-Grillet 468).

An anecdote: Ulysseswas acrimoniously called by the Marxist Karl Radek, “a dung-heap swarming with worms, photographed by a movie-camera through a microscope” (qtd. in Kiberd xvii), a curious view that Joyce might have read more as a praiseful remark than an insult. A novel

like Ulysses, whose form and content are unstable and unpredictable, relishes scatological humour

and is unafraid to juxtapose it with an eschatological threnody. It hyperbolizes literary nonlinearity:

the stream-of-consciousness technique, famously employed by Molly Bloom in the final chapter of

the novel, assumes neither beginning, nor ending. A testament of paradox, Joyce’s novel is

populated by radically different linguistic varieties (what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia),10_innumerable

lists, endless obscure literary references, countless puns, an immensity of Shakespearean allusions,

and so forth. In point of fact, most of the novel’s action is centred on this very multiplicity of discourses. The structure of Ulysses, with its peremptorily idiosyncratic chapters and its fluctuating

languages, is inevitably tangled with its irreverent content. What Joyce’s Ulysses stands for, in our discussion of conventional and defiant conventional novels, is that structural design is not always easily

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unearthed, and much less categorized. To attempt to fix it within a patterned, categorical discourse

is to simultaneously excavate the innermost essence of the text and to inhume its bare framework

under heaps of hypothetical speculation.

Once more, I find it necessary to reiterate that the terminology which I have adopted in

this dissertation is restricted to the context where it is applied. I have conceived two different types

of structurally fixated novels only to juxtapose them with structurally disintegrated fiction, and prove how

novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegans Wake are conventional in structural terms, even if unconventional in any other novelistic characteristics. It is not my intention, therefore, to make

more than a typological suggestion, regarding a form which has always been subjected to the

greatest theoretical debate. If, perchance, the concepts I have presently defined are found to be of

significance to other areas of literary study, then such is a fortuitous, albeit unintended, effect.

To conclude this section of the present chapter, the purpose of Joyce’s Ulysses in this dissertation is merely to demonstrate how conventional and defiant conventional stand on the same firm

ground, divided only in sundry principles, but notwithstanding consciously inhabiting the self-same

theoretical house. Thus, Ulysses is the gateway which will lead us farther down the path of structural

fixation, into the territory of defiant conventional novels, to a realm which gazes unto the boundless

country of structural disintegration, but only from the firry crest of its mountains, not stepping down

its steep slope to embrace the structural liberation that therein resides.

3. The Defiant Conventional Novel

The bizarre shapes of the vocables of Finnegans Wake may leave an unwary reader stranded among

the blank crevices which sunder the sentences imprinted on its pages. The archaeological literary

critic, ever shrewd to find clues to a text’s significance, will in Finnegans Wake drown in a shapeless linguistic mire, whose murky waters gloss over and shade from view the novel’s meaning. There,

in that book’s tumultuous agglomeration of languages, form becomes a serpentine prison, where

reader and text are confined to the strangely limitative abundance of interpretative substance. The

difficulty in producing a cogent interpretation, or explanation, of the novel can be extrapolated to

an analysis of its curiously recurring structure. The novel’s last words redirect the reader to its opening lines. The endless interpretative instability resembles a snake eating its own tail, relishing

the inner organs of its offspring, simultaneously consuming itself. Is Finnegans Wake a text meant

to be read linearly, against the grain of its babelish, irreverent form? We may try to answer this

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Finnegans Wake is arguably one of the most cryptical and celebrated texts of the 20th

century, and one might suggest that it is precisely in its semantic obscurity that lies its allurement.

Jorge Luis Borges had a few words to share about the Irishman’s ‘novelbabel’ (or in pure Joycean

style, ‘novabel’)in his review of the book, titled “Joyce’s Latest Novel”. He writes, “Finnegans Wake

is a concatenation of puns committed in a dreamlike English that is difficult not to categorize as

frustrated and incompetent” (Borges, “Joyce’s Latest Novel” 195). The Argentinian author would

later suggest that Joyce’s last novel requires an ideal reader in order to be interpreted, a reader as

capable as the novel’s author of deciphering its many calembouric riddles (Borges, “A Fragment on Joyce” 221). Given the prolix, overwrought nature of Finnegans Wake, interpretations of the text abound, from the well-known study conducted by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson,

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake(1944), to Jacques Derrida’s extemporary lecture, “Two Words for

Joyce” (1982). A novel so elusive in explanation, a grand jeu de mots which vehemently rejects any exegesis that might be conducted on it, will, however, in the context of this dissertation, be regarded

as a defiant conventional novel.

The proposition that Joyce’s Wake is meant to be read linearly, despite the evidently nonlinear, circular, many-sided interpretative system it requires in order to be read as such, does

not intend to be either dismissive of the novel’s genius or an authoritative categorization of the

text. It is meant only to propose that, given that structural disintegrationmakes explicit the author’s

disavowal of structural design, Finnegans Wake is a text that benefits from the subversive aspect of

structural disintegration but that does not inscribe itself in its structural methodology. At best, one

might tentatively propose that Joyce intended the novel to be read in whichever possible manner,

but it would be a vague, pointless exercise to conjure a writer’s intentions with regard to his or her novel, and would open an exception to other structurally fixated novels. In light of this premise,

perhaps some of Dickens’s novels were meant to be read as structurally disintegrated texts? The question is absurd in its nature and scope. Therefore, in this dissertation I shall not consider

authorial intention when not made explicit, either by the author or by the text itself (as in the case

of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch). Therefore, the Wake remains as it is, a complex, polysemic novel, a

defiant conventional novel, that, notwithstanding, is based on a fixed structural foundation.

The defiant conventional novel is the reverse image of the conventional novel, working, within the

conceptual framework of structural fixation, in opposition to the principles championed by the latter.

Firstly, the defiant conventional novel is against tradition. It only recurs to tradition to sweep the tapestry

of convention off its feet. Contrary to the conventional novel, which willingly embraces the traditions

Of Structural Denial: A Narratological Study of the Structural Disintegration of the Novel Form Hugo Ferraz Maio Gomes